TGen named Certified Service Provider for PacBio

(Press-News.org) The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), part of City of Hope, today announced that is has received Certified Service Provider status from PacBio, a leading developer of high-quality, highly accurate sequencing solutions. The certification follows the addition of the Revio and Onso platforms to TGen’s Collaborative Sequencing Service Center, which provides investigators with access to best-in-class short and long read sequencing instrumentation to support all analysis needs including whole genome, telomere-telomere assembly, exomes, RNA sequencing, and full-length transcript sequencing.

To achieve certification, providers must undergo a rigorous process including training on PacBio sample processing and data analysis workflows. 

“We’re excited to be recognized as a Certified Service Provider for PacBio,” said Collaborative Sequencing Service Center director Jonathan Keats, Ph.D., who is also an assistant professor in the Clinical Genomics and Therapeutics Division at TGen. “This partnership highlights the efforts we undertook to diversify our sequencing offerings into accurate long-read and highly accurate short-reads to meet researchers needs in their discovery and development efforts.”

The main goal of TGen’s Collaborative Sequencing Center (CSC) is to offer researchers access to advanced genomic analysis platforms and data processing systems to tackle today’s scientific challenges by staying at the forefront of sequencing technology.

“We are delighted to announce TGen as the first Certified Service Provider for Onso,” said Jeff Eidel, chief commercial officer at PacBio. “The robust certification process requires providers to meet very strict training and quality standards. TGen and PacBio are both dedicated to supporting the scientific community in their genomic research projects, and we look forward to continuing to grow our partnership as TGen scales on our Onso and Revio platforms.”

The Onso short read sequencer uses sequencing by binding (SBB) technology to achieve industry leading base call accuracy with >90% of bases exceeding Q40 and median base qualities exceeding Q50, one error in 100,000 bases. The flow cells have two independently addressed lanes that together can produce 800-1000 million paired end reads using 100x100 or 150x150 sequencing formats. There is also a single read 200 cycle option available. A recent TGen-led study utilizing the PacBio SBB technology detected target SNPs down to 0.01% at 100,000x depth and 0.1% at 20,000x, without any error correction methods.

Revio offers high-volume, accurate long-read sequencing through circular consensus sequencing (CCS), producing high-quality HiFi reads. The device has four separate sequencing positions, each using an individual SMRT-cell with 25 million zero-mode waveguide (ZMW) sequencing wells. In 24 hours, one SMRT-cell can easily generate greater than 30x coverage of a human genome with the workflows in place at TGen. Besides long, accurate reads from unaltered DNA, the system detects 5mC methylation at CpG sites in eukaryotes and 4mC and 6mA methylation in prokaryotes. The KINNEX array kits are designed both to enable the efficient analysis of full-length RNA isoforms from bulk or single-cell RNA samples and to perform complete 16S ribosomal RNA analysis of microbial populations.

TGen’s comprehensive service offerings are available to academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and commercial enterprises, providing tailored solutions for a wide range of research and development needs. For questions or quotes, please contact thecsc@tgen.org or visit the website at tgen.org/csc
 

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